Background

Correspondence analysis is a popular data analysis method in France and Japan. In France, correspondence analysis was developed under the influence of Jean-Paul Benzécri; in Japan, it was developed under Chikio Hayashi. The name correspondence analysis is a translation of the French analyse des correspondances. The technique apparently has many independent beginnings (for example, Richardson and Kuder 1933; Hirshfield 1935; Horst 1935; Fisher 1940; Guttman 1941; Burt 1950; Hayashi 1950). It has had many other names, including optimal scaling, reciprocal averaging, optimal scoring, and appropriate scoring in the United States; quantification method in Japan; homogeneity analysis in the Netherlands; dual scaling in Canada; and scalogram analysis in Israel.

Correspondence analysis is described in more detail in French in Benzécri (1973) and Lebart, Morineau, and Tabard (1977). In Japanese, the subject is described in Komazawa (1982), Nishisato (1982), and Kobayashi (1981). In English, correspondence analysis is described in Lebart, Morineau, and Warwick (1984), Greenacre (1984), Nishisato (1980), Tenenhaus and Young (1985), Gifi (1990), Greenacre and Hastie (1987), and many other sources. Hoffman and Franke (1986) offer a short, introductory treatment that uses examples from the field of market research.